The coup against capital

Is there a historic or genetic conspiracy against capital and its useful accumulation in Africa? More than its self-inflicted political and spiritual wounds, the perennial and perpetual inability to accumulate and valorise capital is the festering sore of Africa. Even where there is a fundamental breakthrough, the Mansa Musa syndrome takes over. How many first generation businesses survive far into the next generation? Yet you turn any corner of England and you find tailors since the eighteenth century, florists since the nineteenth, bankers since the seventeenth, clothiers since the nineteenth etc.

Perhaps the urgency of the situation must permit us to frame the question in a more desperate and despairing manner. Is the Black man’s brains genetically wired against capital accumulation? Or is there something about the societal configuration in Africa and its autochthonous formations which continually resists and rebels against being co-opted into the orbit of untrammelled capitalism? Is this a fall out of the hunter-gatherer phase of human existence or a case of errant but stubborn localism frustrating the forces of capitalist globalization?

This is not a question of racial inferiority or lack of fundamental ability for capital capacity building and holding. After all, there are successful black entrepreneurs in post-apartheid South Africa and the western world. To be sure, there is nothing pre-ordained or inevitable about the triumph of western modernity and its capitalist mode of production. The west has been able to impose its economic vision on the rest of the world as a result of its military superiority and spiritual ascendancy.

There were English slaves in the court of the Ottoman emperors. A survey once came up with the startling conclusion that despite the thunder and tinsel of modern capitalism, the golden and happiest period in England was the Elizabethan epoch. The compulsive generosity and willingness to share without looking back in times of plenty that we notice in certain traditional societies speak to some alternative life styles that could have moderated and modulated the traumas of modern capitalism.

But since Africa has been frogmarched to the frontiers of western modernity, there is nothing anybody can do about that. The problem is that you cannot redistribute wealth that has not been created by labour and human exertion. To do so is to indulge in starry-eyed idealism which is another word for infantile radicalism.

Let the lore not race ahead of the leitmotif. There are intellectual debts and obligations to be paid and discharged. In a famous essay titled, The Revolution against Capital, Antonio Gramsci, the great Italian journalist, philosopher and outstanding radical theoretician, argued that the Russian Revolution was a revolution against the grain and a social earthquake against the fundamental tenets of Marxism.

The revolution crashed all the gears of Historical and Dialectical Materialism. The ideal conditions of a burgeoning capitalist state and a rampart proletariat were simply not there. Russia was a backward society, with a rudimentary version of capitalism and an underdeveloped workers class.

Yet it happened. The Russian Revolution occurred despite the unpropitious circumstances. It was eight days that changed the world. This was due to the sheer ferocious voluntarism and heroism of the Soviet leadership. They had conjured something out of nothing. In effect, it was also a revolution against Das Kapital, Karl Marx’ opus, as Gramsci’s subtle dig would suggest.

It is arguable that the subsequent tragedy of the Russian people and the revolution itself stems from this fundamental contradiction. But that is neither here nor there. Sometimes, you need barbarity to drive out barbarism, as somebody was to quip. History itself is a horoscope of horror.

It is useful in passing to say something about this rare gem of an Italian political theorist and outstanding patriot. A mortally afflicted hunchback, Gramsci wrote virtually all his works in the most crippling and inhuman of circumstances. Yet he was unmoved by his personal misfortunes. At a point, he constituted himself into a one man think tank against fascism in Italy. When the Italian authorities finally tired of his intellectual provocations, Mussolini sent him to jail with the war cry: “We must prevent this brain from functioning for twenty years!”

Unfortunately for Benito Mussolini, you can only imprison the man and not the mind. It was in prison and from horrendous captivity that Gramsci did his most productive and outstanding work. These days when you hear of American tenured professors under the comfort of five-star hotels noisily quarrelling about whether Gramsci was a Marxist or not, you begin to feel sorry for the sheer attenuation of the human spirit.

This general debility of the soul and attenuation of the human spirit is at its most compelling on the African continent. Here, the revolt against capital and capitalism is on the grand stage and it is unlike any other thing witnessed in the history of mankind. The BBC crew were at their best and most devastating in a recent panoramic survey of the diseased hulk of old Zaire. Nothing can match the modern tragedy of this potentially prosperous country with its infinite natural resources.

Everything has been laid to waste in a series of wars without a formal front or frontier. The country itself had long regressed into a state of nature with the inhabitants reminding one of the feral denizens of a vast human zoo. For a moment, the camera zeroed in on the ruins of Gbadolite, Mobutu’s birthplace and home to his fabled marble palace. This scandalous eyesore must rank as the greatest indictment of the coup against capital in post-colonial Africa.

The whole place was in ruins. The airstrip from which Mobutu used to import his barber and daily venison from Paris— that is when he was not gorging on locally grown giant maggots washed down with pink champagne— had been reclaimed by nature and now home to savage reptiles. The palace itself lay in utter ruins with its gold-encrusted Jacuzzis. What cannot be looted had been vandalised, and what cannot be looted and vandalised had been overtaken by desuetude. This is the most compelling evidence of insanity among Africa’s post-colonial leaders.

In a 31 year career, Mobutu looted and stole his country blind. At a point, the vicious kleptocrat even had the temerity to lend his “personal funds” to the country. Congo is one vast crematorium of wasted capital. If Mobutu had used just a fraction of the capital violently expropriated from the Congolese people to grow education and build factories, the country could have taken off. In the end, Congolese capital returned to metropolitan capitalists who needed it most. It was Mobutu’s greatest coup against the Congo people and Africa.

As the National Conference unfolds tomorrow, the dire view from the old Zaire must concentrate the minds of Nigerian patriots. The two African giants are often compared. Nigeria’s luck, unlike the Congo, is that it is powered along by a micro-pluralism of countervailing power centres which ensures a negative equilibrium at least. Succeeding military and civilian despots have done their damnable best to upset the delicate apple cart. But divine fate and Nigeria’s legendary luck have always seen them off.

But Nigerians cannot be complacent about this fabled good luck. Until General Sani Abacha stole them blind even as he culled off their leading lights, many Nigerians believed that the kind of fiscal anarchy and privatised tyranny that characterised Mobutu’s Congo could not happen in Nigeria.

But just short of five years, aided by modern technology and his contempt for conventional stealing, Abacha almost beat Mobutu in his own game. Yet when he died, there was no evidence that Abacha ever ploughed back a fraction of the money he looted from the treasury into any productive economic venture.

Apart from his magnificent castle in Kano, Abacha did not leave any viable or visible economic monument. In a historic addendum, the United States only last week dismissed the former Nigerian despot as a vicious kleptocrat while impounding his stashed loot. African capital has returned to metropolitan capitalists with plenty of insults to the bargain.

In the light of this unending kleptomania among African rulers which has returned the blighted continent to the Stone Age while the rest of the world marches on to new frontiers of civilisation, the original question must now be framed in a more fundamental manner. Is there something wrong about the genetic wiring of Africa’s post-colonial elite?

In a curious paradox, it is Nigeria which provides the key to unlocking the problem. Whenever a fundamental economic crisis is framed as a political quarrel among squabbling elite, we may be sure that there is a red herring somewhere. Away from the hysterical cat-calls and strident abuses, this is a more productive way of framing the problem of the missing 20 billion naira, the Sanusi ouster and the culture of political and economic impunity on all sides.

In her first tour of duty as Finance Minister, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, paid off all of Nigeria’s disputable debt in one fell swoop and swore to rid the nation of its international profile as a chronic debtor-nation. Many doubted the wisdom and even sanity of this economic strategy but decided to watch and pray. In a cruel and ironic twist of fate, the same debt profile has opened up again with alarming implications and under the watch of the same Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala.

Judging by all available data, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, in her second tour and now as the coordinating Minister, is presiding over the worst spell and spree of kleptocracy in the history of the nation. All she could now do is to wring her hands and hint about oil as a curse—a theoretical no-brainer for sure. Meanwhile, the presidential airline boasts of at least ten planes in its fleet while the British Prime Minister goes about on commercial flights. In Abuja, it is said that they now sell one million naira per bottle champagne.

In the case of Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, how can anybody justify or rationalise the bizarre feudal munificence by which under his watch the Central Bank of the nation became one huge financial almshouse dispensing largesse to anybody in sight? What is the modern theory of economic management behind this bastard feudalism, or is this a classic case of avant-garde political radicalism fronting for economic and social retrogression?

In a general culture of lawlessness and impunity there is nothing to choose between impunity at the micro-level and impunity at the macro level. They are just two sides of the same bad coin. This is not the time for any partisan equivocation. Nigeria has been poorly served by its undeserving political elite. It will take a character-changing event to effect any rectification.

But it is not a situation that can subsist for long. Once it was said that the Congo could not happen here. And then General Abacha came along. Even in a civilian dispensation under an ascendant faction of the political elite, the coup against capital continues. It is useful to recall that at a point Mobutu also indulged his cruel fancies in a sham National Conference. As a thousand mysterious militias and unknown gunmen continue to put Nigerians to sword at will, let the fate of the old Congo and the ruins of Gbadolite concentrate our mind for once.

Snooper : Your coethnic saw to it that those of your brethren; made prostrate by military defeat, who showed, and still show the most valor in Capital accumulation and husbandry, were rendered destitute. See how far they’ve come from 20 pounds per diem. While we moan about metropolitan capital flight, let us ponder on self inflicted injuries.

IskaCountryman

tut tut..tut…we have been cursed…when you die and you sinned on earth…allah returns you back to earth as a black man…

BOLA AWONIRAN

Yes, Sir Congo can not happen here,reason why the foetus of Abacha tyranny was clinicalyl aborted before it reach maturity,thanks to patriots like WS,late Alao Aka Bashorun,Barrister Femi Falana,Dr Beko Ransome Kuti,Ndubuisi Kanu,Colonel Abubakar Umar Dangiwa,one prof A williams,et al.Legendary luck be damn,there are Nigerians super patriots working round the clock,burning the midnight oil so that this fatherland will actualize its manifest destiny,if it is still standing bloodied but unbowed despite the thousand cuts it has sustained and continues to endure from its traitorous diabolical offspring ,it has nothing to do with luck,it has all to do with the indomitable spirit of its noble patriotic offspring waging titanic battle and war on tactical and strategic level to keep the the soul of this fatherland sacred and noble.

As to this question of yours”Is there a historic or genetic conspiracy against capital and its useful accumulation in Africa?”

I will respond that yes there is a historic conspiracy against capital and its useful accumulation in Africa,after all the themantic focus of colonialism is primitive accumulation of capital through barbaric and primitive exploitation of the colonial subjects and his resources,and when colonialism metamorphosed into imperialism and neo colonialism ,brutal,rapacious and unscrupulous under valuation of neo colonial subjects and his capital(property) became the norm,reason why original inhabitants of Lekki were uprooted from their property ,which was latter upgraded and reevaluated to worth millions,and then parceled out to the neo colonial running dogs,whereas all that was needed to be done was empowered the original owners by given them deeds or cof o to their land and develop the land ,so as to enhance the value,thereby enabling them to use the title to access capital.(for further enumeration sir,I urge you to read the Peruvian economist Herman De Soto on this issue),where are still waiting for what is going to become of Mkoko
As for anti Okonjo I,ve aver in the past that she is a trojan horse,her first time around was as a debt collector for her western masters,and having accomplished that ,she was sent on another errand,that of destroying our fatherland economically,so as to make it regionally politically ineffective and irrelevant ,hence incapacitate it to actualize its manifest destiny,and in the process hand over our sovereingn wealth to Goldman Sachs ,an accomplice
But Sir,you know what ?all this shall pass,we are indomitable,we are exceptional and we shall overcome.
STAY MIGHTY AND BLESSED SIR AS ALWAYS.

oluwole

The Zairois and Nigerian political histro-political paths are hardly the same. Nigeria did NOT have a Sergeant Joseph Desire Mobutu in 1966….could NOT have had. We KNOW those who created Mobutu…..the Nigerian HISTORY created an Abacha. Nigeria, even now, is NOT the near-tragedy the Congo has become, the paradox is that the historic fault lines of Nigeria collectively cushion Nigeria from falling into the abyss. Their existence may yet induce Nigeria into a working federalism or it may well be the components will go their separate ways….though that will be a sad commentary on the valiant efforts that have gone to save the union.

Rufus O

It is not for lack of trying or the possession of the requisite branial capacity that tempered our tendency for the accumulation of capital. Rather, it was the nature of the traditional economic system that was adopted by some African societies. We were basically an agrarian society. The Yoruba for example adopted the Aro system which was a communalistic form of arrangement in which members of a particular commune took time to work on one another’s farm. This is hardly a system that encourages capital accumulation. Add to this the fact that the legal tender of the Yoruba, for example, was the cowrie shell. It was not enough to accumulate capital, but one must be able to carry same around for business transactions. It thus required men of immense might and main to ferry a million in cowrie shells from one location to another. With the advent of paper money, moving capital was made easy .